Using blister custom functions

Examples

Let's take an example. Say you are a small garage, with a stock list of cars and you work exclusively with spreadsheets. You don't want to take copies of the list, but you want everyone to use the same list across multiple spreadsheets.

Here's your list

Loading list to scriptDB

Once loaded to a library, it will be available to all collaborators who need this list. The load operation is a script that looks something like this. This will create the list 'car_list' in the local scriptDB where I have the master list. To access this, other collaborating spreadsheets simply need to reference this master sheet as a library reference. The resultant 'blister' will contain 4 lists, each named after their column heading, and sorted by 'make'

That's a few examples of the kind of thing you can do without even needing to have the list in your workbook. Naturally all these (and others) are available through script too. That (and validation) will be the subject of future articles as I finalize what this thing is going to look at.

Using a library

Of course the point here is to make the same list available to multiple workbooks. To be able to reference the scriptDB of another library is just a matter of adding a reference to the library in the script. These functions will then reference the library's scriptDB rather than its own by prefixing the list ID with the library name.

Looking up the language code in the global blister library would look like this.

=blisterLookup("blister.languageCodes","Chinese","language","code")

Getting the column headings

It's often useful to get the column headings - especially if using blisterData() to get a dump of the data

=blisterHeaders("blister.airlines")

Or you can get a single heading - in this case the name of the 2nd column

=blisterHeaders("blister.airlines",2)

Getting all known blisters in a library

=blisterDirectory("blister")

will list all known listIds and descriptions in the shared blister library. No argument will give you known blisters associated with your local sheet's scriptDb.

Getting description

=blisterDirectory("blister.languageCodes")

will list description stored when list was created.

Getting update Date

=blisterUpdateDate ("blister.languageCodes")

will show date of last update to the list

All comments, suggestions, assistance, good lists are welcome as I develop this capability. You can get me on Google plus, Twitter or this forum.